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You Should Buy This Just Cause We Say So

Just Cause 2 review takes us from land to sea to sky. Are we happy travelers?

By Chris Plante March 23, 2010
  
You won't like this if...

you hate joy, happiness, crashing helicopters, grappling hooking bad guys and being super duper awesome.

Just Cause 2
Credit: Eidos

I'll tell ya, stealing a military helicopter, using it to lay waste to the base you swiped it from, fleeing enemy air support, then bailing out at 500 feet to parachute into the jungle and make good your escape just never gets old. But such epic stuff only scratches the proverbial surface of the cornucopia of tropical violence and snow-covered mayhem that is Just Cause 2.

Like its predecessor, JC2 follows the black-ops exploits of Rico Rodriguez, ass-kicker extraordinaire, as he plies his trade in the fictional South Pacific nation of Panau. The small country is ruled by an oppressive dictator and -- okay, let's just hang on a second here. I want to take a moment and say how friggin' outstanding JC2's graphics are. I mean, I never harp on graphics, but if I were to ever meet Megan Fox in real life, I would totally tell her that she is as incredibly good-looking as JC2...and I would be lying, because if JC2 was a woman, she would make Megan Fox look like a tore-up hood rat. Depth of field, viewable distance, complex textures, sense of motion, water effects, variety of topography; absolutely everything in the way this game looks contributes to a sense of being in the game world, rather than merely watching it go by on your TV screen.

Grand Theft Auto series. After a short tutorial segment, you're dropped near one of Panau's small towns and left to your own dark devices. You can choose to join up with one of the island's separatist factions, which'll give you access to side missions (often involving nifty set-pieces like an assault on a nuclear reactor), you can focus on the main story (an intrigue concerning the disappearance of Rico's former mentor), or you can just wile out and cause consternation among the populace. Whatever you choose to do, you will absolutely, positively, need to blow shit up. JC2's most important resource is "chaos," caused, mostly, by destroying stuff that the government owns: fuel stations and radio towers, SAM sites, and radar stations -- just about anything marked with the Panauan "star" can be destroyed to add to your chaos score. Scoring more chaos points unlocks missions in the main story (and the side stories), as well as unlocking new weapons, vehicles, and other power-ups from the black market with which you can more effectively cause chaos, and the cycle continues.

Integrating free-flowing destruction into the gameplay model was a stroke of genius, but what really sets JC2 apart from other sandboxers is its commitment to making you feel free to play around with the world sans consequences. It accomplishes this not only by throwing more than a hundred different vehicles (including boats and a frickin' flyable Boeing 737) at you, not only by making the game world wonderfully variegated (from high, snowy mountains to tropical jungles to Dakar-rally-esque deserts), but primarily with a couple of small, critical details: Rico's grappling hook and parachute.

The grappling hook can attach to any surface within 100 meters of Rico, and will automatically yank him towards what it hooks onto (including vehicles) at a high rate of speed. And you can deploy the parachute instantly at the press of a button, anytime Rico is even a foot or two off the ground. The combination of these two things gives Rico speed and freedom of movement that only Batman normally gets to experience, and it makes the world of Panau easy (and therefore tremendously fun) to explore. Unlike in GTA, where you're often trapped at ground level, or in Infamous, where the topography is pretty much identical throughout, Rico's grapnel-chute combo allows him to scale huge skyscrapers, glide wistfully from mountaintop to river bottom, and even hook one thing to another thing (try grappling bad guys to moving vehicles for particularly hilarious results). The end-product is an experimental playground where "hey, I wonder if this will work" actually frickin' does.

Yeah, the writing and voice acting aren't that good (although Swedish developer Avalanche Interactive tries its damndest to be funny, God bless their icy Scandinavian hearts), and the story kinda doesn't make sense -- but who in the ninth circle of Satan's butthole cares? This game is so well designed that time after time in my playthrough I thought, "Man, wouldn't it be great if this game had X?" and then, lo and behold, X appears, like the albatross to the Ancient Mariner, except in a totally good way that doesn't cause the mass suffering and death of my shipmates. Honestly, I can't think of any reason why anyone who loves video games won't enjoy JC2. Learn it. Love it. Live it.

Originally published on 1UP.

Second Opinion:

I've had a week now with Just Cause 2 and I can only agree with this glowing review. Just Cause 2 has it's problems, namely a steep control learning curve and a few mindless missions (more mindless than the rest), but the sheer amount of potential for destruction the island offers negates these complaints.

At one point, early on, I decided to travel to a small island that looked like a spec on the horizon. For maybe five straight minutes I pulled my floating hero, strapped into a parachute, from boat to boat, closing in on an island that couldn't seem to stop expanding. What I discovered was a well-guarded fuel refinery. I hopped into the nearest helicopter, undetected, and destroyed the entire place.

The trip, the serene skim across the water, and the reward, island apocalypse, were so different, but both so entertaining. It was a uniquely Just Cause 2 experience.

See More: Just Cause 2 | Eidos | Avalanche Studios | Demo | Just Cause 2 demo | Square-Enix